El movimiento fractura “lo internacional” — o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing “the international” —or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?]

Abstract

Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.